I wrote an article so far about ghost towns, and there will be several more over time… as well as all sorts of strange phenomenon and bizarre people and their lifestyles — often with the help of Weird NJ a really great publication that has been around for several years. Emily always had stacks of their magazines since I first met her, and loads of beautiful black and white photos that she took back in the day at abandon looney bins across the state. If you haven’t visited such a place yet, and are even slightly into this stuff… you have to! there is no way to describe the eeriness, and the feeling of such history - in many cases, not the very best history… which on one hand can be sad, on the other - visiting some of these places is better than any haunted house attraction you’ve ever paid for at an amusement park. Weird NJ started off as a newsletter sent by Mark Sceurman and Mark Moran to their friends to let them know of their travels, then grew to be a magazine read by tens of thousands of people as fascinated as they were with NJ’s modern folklore. These include a clock tower in the Palisades where you can supposedly meet the devil himself, and a tunnel in Clifton claimed to be a portal to hell by the local teenage population.
Some of the spots are spooky, others are just plain weird. One that caught my attention… in ‘83 the construction of Indian Curse Road, a 7 mile stretch of Route 55, just off Route 47 near Franklin Township… soon came to an end after mysterious deaths began to befall the workers… an asphalt roller truck ran over a worker, another fell from an overpass to his death, soon after an inspector fell dead on the job from a brain aneurysm. One worker’s feet turned black, then a van carrying five DOT employees caught fire and blew up. Carl Pierce. the chief and medicine man of the Delaware Indians, explained why — the land was an ancient Indian burial ground, and therefore sacred. “All they had to do was detour around the field and nothing would have happened”.
Then, not so much spooky, but peacefully bizarre… Richie and Leila Zorzi of Kendall Park are collectors, not of the normal treasures - but bowling balls… and they’re all over their yard, around trees, up and down the driveway… after a while people would just leave them at their doorstep.. Soon after, the couple would decorate their entire front lawn with children’s ride-on rocking horses…
I’ll be posting about more of these odd places, and a bunch of us will need to take a day trip one of these days… including Centralia which I already wrote about… the town above coal that has been burning for over 45 years already, expected to keep going for at least another 100 years or so….
…suggestions for other places, especially abandon towns are very welcome so please don’t hesitate to let us know!!